Reddit continues to show how little they care. I hope they get the IPO over with relatively soon so we can watch it turn into Tumblr, and have an exodus of people move to a service that "remembers the human".

All my Reddit accounts are banned now, but back in the day I was contributing how-to posts and the like. I was a mod on a larger subreddit too. The bans were mostly “incorrect” and a result of automation e.g. “X people reported it so it must be against the Reddit rules because people only report things that are against the rules, right?” Anyway it’s become a cesspool and I’m glad it’s dying.

Of course.

They can't be sold for datamining... Why would Reddit waste money keeping them?

They're more likely burying the bodies.

My bet is they just sold it for cash.

I doubt they've deleted it. They've just made it unavailable for scraping (not logged in), so anyone who wants older data for that purpose will have to pay for it.

It seems this action would also have the undesirable side-effect of gradually removing older Reddit pages from search engines.

These are chats and messages though, they were never publicly scrapable to begin with.

This fits perfectly with their new, greedy persona.

Plus, data is cheap to store, especially if it’s already stored. It would cost them more to delete the data and repurpose the hard drives.

So it was announced with 1 week notice?

During summer, when people are on vacation?

Consider r/redditseppuku